A funny from Crayons

New readers can unintentionally provide a lot of humor.

At lunch, Mr. Fixit was looking at something that came in the mail, and Crayons was looking over his shoulder. "Real...Easter...Update," she read. A real Easter update?

Oh, a real estate update.

I think I preferred Crayons' version!

This is too hard, too boring, irrelevant...

Mom makes us work too hard. Not another book! School is hard. If my children were talking Barbies, they might echo that unfortunate doll (who had her conversation chip yanked for saying that math is too hard). Yes, the Apprentice and Ponytails do complain about school, lest you think that these Shakespeare-reading progeny do everything excellently without ever needing to be prodded (that's only true of other peoples' children, right?). After all, The Apprentice isn't planning on going to university anyway...she alternates between interests in hairdressing/cosmetics, photography, and computer information systems (maybe she'll figure out a way to do all of them). Why does this stuff matter?

So I have some alternatives. I could buy a fill-in-the-blanks homeschool curriculum instead of boring them with Thomas More or Winston Churchill. (Jane Austen and Charles Dickens don't get the "boring" face, for some reason.) I could let them follow their own interests completely. I could buy some of those prepared novel studies, comprehension workbooks, language textbooks, and spend a lot more time teaching them to write five-sentence paragraphs. (Squirrelings, that's not meant to be a threat--some homeschoolers spend a lot of time on those things because that's just the way they do school, and it works for them.)

I could send them to public school, so that they could develop the the following characteristics of current university students. (This list comes from Barbara Aggerholm's story "Educating the next wave" in The Record, April 24, 2006. I'm only including some of them.)

* "Doing" is more important than "knowing." In other words, what you know is less important than knowing where to get the answer. "You don't have to master the subject anymore," Sharpe said. [Associate Professor Bob Sharpe of Wilfrid Laurier University, who led a seminar about preparing for the next generation of students.]
* They have zero tolerance for delays. When they send an e-mail to a professor, they want an answer immediately.
* They're consumers rather than producers of knowledge.
* They blur the lines between consumer and creator by sampling information on the Internet and producing new forms of expression.

(That last one, in particular, intrigues me. It sounds like one of those creative report card comments that really means "He cheated on his term paper.")

Or we can keep on reading writers who are much wiser and better educated than we are, taking what we can from their thoughts, and making our responses to their books a central part of Treehouse homeschooling.

In spite of the grousing, there are those moments when I know that what we're doing is what we're supposed to be doing. Like when Ponytails asked for a James Whitcomb Riley poetry book at a booksale last year, or The Apprentice kindly found me a volume of Tennyson at this year's sale. Or when I found The Apprentice reading her Canadian history book without being reminded, or saw Ponytails poring over a map of Narnia. Or when The Apprentice found a creative way to make her science experiment work even though somebody discarded the plastic pop bottle she was hoarding. (Sorry.) Or when Ponytails was genuinely sad at finishing a biography of Galileo. Or when Crayons read me back part of the Charlotte's Web chapter we'd just finished together (I had to work her into this post somehow).

We'll try to understand that delays happen...there are disappointments...and that not everything's fun (though something can be enjoyable in its own way without being fun). Maybe the Squirrelings will be strange enough to think that knowing something is even more valuable than knowing where to look it up (or where to copy it from the Internet). Maybe when we've read Utopia and How to Read a Book and Whatever Happened to Justice, there won't be so many blurry lines. Maybe they will be subversive enough to think that they can be producers as well as consumers of knowledge.

If they turned out like that, I wouldn't mind at all.

Four homeschool days with Ponytails

This is a four-day school week for us (we took Monday off), so these lessons cover what Ponytails did over the last two days and what's planned for the rest of the week. This week also marked the start of our spring term, although a lot of what she's doing is just continuing from the winter.

Tuesday:
Bible: listen to part of Proverbs 1. Start keeping a new illustrated copybook for Proverbs (one verse and one drawing for each chapter).
Copywork: one verse from Proverbs, see above.
Grammar and spelling: Ruth Beechick-style exercises based on The Enchanted Forest (a fairytale in chapters that Ponytails is reading to herself)--looking for synonyms, spelling patterns, word meanings, etc.
Miquon Math: Division concepts.
French: short lesson about "Je sens avec le nez."
Canadian History: Canada's Story, chapter 7, about Champlain and Captain Kirke (really).

Wednesday:
Pilgrim's Progress, Book II--about four pages (part of this section)
Copywork/handwriting: worked on capital G in cursive.
Miquon Math: Reviewed division lesson; did five adding/subtracting word problems.
Shakespeare (with Mom and The Apprentice): read two scenes from Two Gentlemen of Verona.
British History: An Island Story chapter 84: King Monmouth. Marked her timeline.
Minn of the Mississippi, chapter 14 (and an online jigsaw puzzle about the Mississippi)

Thursday:
Bible: Proverbs 2.
Copywork: verse from Proverbs.
Read poems with Mom.
Language work: same. Read some of The Enchanted Forest alone.
French: short lesson.
Natural History: Secrets of the Woods--finish the Tookhees chapter.
Canadian History: Canada's Story, chapter 8 (the death of Champlain). Timeline.
Read Children of the New Forest with Mom and The Apprentice.

Friday:
Bible: Proverbs 3.
Copywork: verse from Proverbs.
Language work: dictation from The Enchanted Forest.
Miquon Math.
The Heroes, by Charles Kingsley: Theseus, part 1.
Science: The Story of Inventions, pages 271-280, about Alexander Graham Bell. Do some experiments with sound.

Other things Ponytails is doing:
Reading The Magician's Nephew with Mom
Listening to Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang read on CD
Making clothes for a felt doll
Playing outside
Eating Easter candy
Loving her "pet bird" that drinks water
Watching everybody's beans sprout (a science experiment)

Well-mannered

The Squirrelings are not always well behaved. (!)

Crayons' account of a fracas she got into with Ponytails:

"I was just colouring nicely, and she hit me. And after that we took turns hitting each other."

Well, at least they were polite about it.

Stuff and nonsense

My friend the DHM at The Common Room quoted Charlotte Mason today:

"There is absolutely no avenue to knowledge but knowledge itself, and the schools must begin, not by qualifying the mind to deal with knowledge, but by affording all the best books."--Towards a Philosophy of Education (Vol. 6), pg. 347

Did she mean the most serious books? The hardest books? The longest books?

Just before Miss Mason gets to that point in the chapter, she has been describing the sad case of two young men who had a half-baked education (in her view), who "laboured indefatigably" at making sense of the books they picked up as young adults, but who admitted themselves that "You and I go at a subject all wrong!"

What was one of the books they couldn't make sense of? Alice in Wonderland.

Deeply impressed he bought the book as soon as he returned to London and read it earnestly. To his horror he saw no sense in it. Then it struck him that it might be meant as nonsense and he had another try, then he concluded that it was rather funny but he remained disappointed.

Here, again, is another evidence of the limitations attending an utter absence of education. A cultivated sense of humour is a great factor in a joyous life, but these young men are without it. Perhaps the youth addicted to sports usually fails to appreciate delicate nonsense; sports are too strenuous to admit of a subtler, more airy kind of play....

So we have to give our children more than facts, more than vocabulary drills. Knowledge, yes...the DHM's post points that out well, along with the sad fact of our culture's anti-knowledge bent. But also another kind of knowing...an understanding of laughter and nonsense that goes beyond the usual nose-picking humor found in childrens' books. They need to meet characters like my aged Uncle Arly, sitting on a heap of barley...and the Humbug...and the White Knight, one of my favourite characters in any book. They need some silliness, some furry squirrel puppets (I promise we'll do a post about Dewey soon), some knock-knock jokes, some James Thurber, and eventually some Wodehouse and Chesterton. They need to let their brains learn to play and dance and jump around with all the wonderful connections that a sense of nonsense allows. They need some nonsense so they can understand inventiveness...and a mandatory credit in inventiveness and creativity will not substitute.

I found this posted on the Catholic Culture blog:

A friend said all this reminded him of the scene in The Chronicles of Narnia where Aslan (God) creates Narnia, including an odd little bird which, like all the animals, can talk. The bird says something ridiculous and all the other creatures laugh. Turning to Aslan, the bird says, “Oh, Aslan, have I made the first joke?” “No,” Aslan replies, “you are the first joke.” My friend says there is a moral here.

I think he's right.

She knows what she likes

Crayons' comment about today's lunch:

"I could eat a hundred grilled cheese sandwiches. And a hundred macaroni and cheese (that wasn't on the menu). And a hundred kiffle. And a hundred of my favourite beans."

What more could you ask for?

Good Friday Thought

After an emergency or a crisis, there is always the time when you come back and look around at the place that you left in such a hurry.

About ten years ago, my grandmother got very sick and was rushed to the hospital. I went to my parents’ house and found a crockpot full of chili sitting on the counter that had been there since suppertime the night before. You don’t always stop to clean things up when you’re in a hurry.

I was wondering who cleaned up after the last supper. Were some of the disciples intending to come back after their after-dinner walk with Jesus? Then everything was interrupted. Was it hours later, even the next day, that anyone came back into that upstairs room where Jesus had washed their feet and talked about the bread and the cup?

What did they see? Was there maybe the bowl and a still-damp towel, sitting on the floor? Maybe there was a cup that someone had knocked over, with the wine spilling out. Maybe some of the bread was left on the plate, leftovers broken in pieces. Maybe there were candles burned down to stubs, or empty oil lamps that they had used to light the room during their last meal with Jesus. Had they expected to come back to a room that felt so empty and yet that held so many things that reminded them of their Lord?

What did they do with the things? Did someone get busy then and wash the dishes? Did they pack everything away as it was, not wanting to have to deal with such things at such a time? Did they call some women in and ask them to wipe everything up?

Or did someone else come in and clear everything away, not knowing anything about what had happened there that night? Did the disciples come back to a room that was empty, cleaned out? Maybe the whole thing seemed like a dream that had never happened.

What do you think?

Good Friday

And all three stood and wept. Even the Lion wept: great Lion-tears, each tear more precious than the Earth would be if it was a single solid diamond....

"Son of Adam," said Aslan, "go into that thicket and pluck the thorn that you will find there, and bring it to me."

Eustace obeyed. The thorn was a foot long and sharp as a rapier.

"Drive it into my paw, son of Adam," said Aslan, holding up his right fore-paw and spreading out the great pad toward Eustace.

"Must I?" said Eustace.

"Yes," said Aslan.

Then Eustace set his teeth and drove the thorn into the Lion's pad. And there came out a great drop of blood, redder than all redness that you have ever seen or imagined. And it splashed into the stream over the dead body of the King.

--C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

Thinking outside the package

Several years ago, I went to a post-Christmas sale at a craft store. In the final-clearance, nobody-wants-this bin, I found a couple of Christmas-themed cross-stitch kits that came with some kind of square plastic frames, and bought them for about 75 cents apiece. When I got home, I realized that floss was not included in the kits. I didn't have much floss and definitely not in the right colours, and I don't get to the craft store much. The kits sat. And sat. I kept thinking "someday when they've got floss on sale, I should go and match up all the right colours, and get what I need, and make up those kits." But it wasn't really high on the list of priorities. I'm not even a very good cross-stitcher.

I tried to give the kits away to a crafty friend, but she didn't want them. So they sat.

Finally I was about to put them in a thrift-shop box. And then I took another look at the packages, and a light went on. Those things in my hands were meant to be coasters: nice, heavy-duty clear plastic coasters that you could insert your needlework into. Or anything else! Aha! (You mean I'm allowed to throw out those cross-stitch patterns I've never used? Sigh of relief.)

Since it was close to Father's Day, I found a couple of colourful family pictures that we'd taken at a mini-golf course; stuck them on some printed origami paper (because the pictures were smaller than the coasters); got the kids to sign their names below the pictures; and inserted the whole works into the coasters. One for Mr. Fixit, one for Grandpa Squirrel. Mr. Fixit now uses his coaster every night for his bedtime tea.

Now I'm not expecting that you're going to run out and raid the bargain bins looking for useless needlework kits. But it does illustrate a basic frugal principle. As the DHM at the Common Room likes to say, what do you have in your hand? And if you can't use something in the way it was intended, could you use part of it for something else? Sometimes you'll come up with something even nicer than what it was really meant for.

Money habits...and promises

LRJohnson's Savings Blog posted recently about Habits, Habits (linked through the 18th Festival of Frugality). She points out:

I did not start buying oatmeal at the same time that I stopped buying pre-made cartons of juice. Powdered milk came into my life at a different time than the concept of having a max price I’d pay for an item. (For me that’s an In My Head Price Book.) I didn’t start putting leftovers in salsa tub Tupperware at the same time I decided to buy generic or store brand for everything. TVP and bulghur and beans entered my life at different times. But all of these thrifty skills and habits accumulated, over the years, to become a low grocery bill. I incorporate a new habit every now and then, and add it to the routine.

And so on.

The Squirrels can identify with this. We have often had people ask exactly how we have managed to stay out of debt, have Mama Squirrel stay home with the Squirrelings, etc.; and it is often difficult to answer; or, to be more exact, any honest answer makes it sound more difficult than it has been. At the time we got married, we agreed to keep a running journal of our joint budget and expenses for the year, and to stick as close as possible to the amounts we had agreed on for things like clothes and groceries. We also treated Mama Squirrel's rather paltry wages as extra money but not something to be counted on--which was a good thing, because the Squirrelings started coming along very soon after that. (We still keep a budget binder--it really helps with each year's planning.)

Like LRJohnson, we acquired different habits of saving at different times--or changed them as we went along. There are things we do better now than we did fifteen years ago--those are the habits we've learned. Some things we figured out ourselves or from reading; I think some of the rest are ideas we picked up from watching what our parents and other relatives did. We might not have acted on them until we got married, but they were absorbed!

Some of the habits don't seem money-related; they just involve taking care of things so that they don't have to be replaced as fast or cleaned as often. (We rarely eat meals or have drinks in the car; we don't wear shoes in the house.) We buy store brand groceries, eat leftovers, pass down clothes, go to yard sales, and use/wear/drive things until they won't work/fit/run anymore. (And we try to replace parts before tossing things--that's getting harder to do all the time, though. Most things now are made to be tossed, not fixed, and the parts cost more than the original gizmo.) There are other things we stopped doing...at one time I attempted to keep Mr. Fixit's work socks darned, but his workboots kept putting so many holes into them that I gave up. And anyway, he no longer wears workboots.

But there's one other factor that comes into it for us. Along with habits, we needed faithfulness--and we had to be committed to that from the start. Before we knew each other, and even during the year that we dated, we each had different spending patterns than we did post-wedding. We went out for more meals (and fancier ones), we bought more new clothes, we just seemed to go through more cash in general. But somehow, along with the promises we made to be faithful to each other in other ways, we both came into marriage with a feeling of "this money we have now takes care of both of us--so we have to be responsible to each other with it." No spending sprees, no "I worked for this so I should have more of it", no demands for things that the budget wouldn't allow (brand new furniture or vacation cruises), no tossing the toothpaste tube before we'd squished the last squish. I don't know that we ever even sat down and spelled all that out (definitely not the toothpaste part); it was just understood. We also knew that we weren't accountable only to each other: we were responsible to God for what he'd entrusted us with.

And that--as much as frugal habits--is what's kept us solvent.

Only in Canada

Tonight I was reading our family favourite Little Tim and The Brave Sea Captain to Crayons. Then she read some of it back to me. In the story, Tim stows away on a ship and is made to work as a cabin boy. And then the weather gets rough. Crayons read,

"But alas, Tim soon began to feel sick, and when he went down to the galley he could not eat any of the titbits that the cook gave him."

Only she read it "any of the Timbits."

Well, it WAS a Little Tim story.

Postscript: Crayons now says that she wants to be a sailor too.

Good Friday Kiffle

We have a Good Friday food tradition at the Treehouse. Some people eat hot cross buns on Good Friday; we make and eat Mr. Fixit's German grandma's Kiffle.

Kiffle (they sound like kee'-fa-la) are not those rolled-up European pastries called kipfel (although Grandma did make something like that too). These Kiffle are more like Polish Kolacky or Czech Kolache--a small, sweet yeast bun with fruit or jam filling poked into its side. We didn't have an authentic recipe for them from Grandma--I don't know if it was ever written out, she did most of her cooking without recipes. There are Kolacky/Kolache recipes online that sound pretty close-- this one is much like ours only it makes twice as many and uses a whole lot more butter.

The version we came across a few years ago and make every year (because Mr. Fixit says it's reasonably close to his grandma's Kiffle) comes from Dorothy R. Bates' Kids Can Cook vegetarian cookbook, published by The Book Publishing Company in Tennessee (yes, the tofu people). It makes about 24 small rolls, most of which get eaten pretty fast.

(A historical note from Grandma: she told us that when she was growing up in Eastern Europe, the traditional snack on Good Friday was popcorn. So sometimes we make popcorn too.)

Kolacky (or Kiffle)

1. Mix in a small bowl: 1 tbsp. yeast, 1 tsp. honey, 1/4 cup warm water.

2. Cream together: 1 stick (1/2 cup) margarine or butter, softened; 2 tbsp. honey; 1 tsp. salt.

3. Stir in and beat well: 1 egg, 1 cup warm water, 1 cup flour.

4. Add the yeast mixture and stir well together.

5. Slowly add, while stirring: 3 to 4 cups flour. Use enough to make dough soft but not sticky.

6. Turn it out onto a floured surface and knead it a few times. Put it in an oiled bowl and turn it around to coat with oil.

7. Cover bowl with a clean towel. Let rise for about 45 minutes, until doubled in size.

8. Knead down, pinch off balls, the size of a walnut, place on a lightly greased baking sheet.

9. Let rise another 30 minutes.

10 Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Press down the centers with your thumb to make a small hollow. (The online Kolache recipe notes that you have to press down good and hard, because otherwise the indentations will "pop out" while they're baking.) Fill each hollow with 1 tsp. apricot preserves, or peach preserves, or apple butter.

11. When oven is hot, put rolls in oven and bake for 12 to 15 minutes. Tops should be lightly browned.

12. Remove from oven and cool. If desired, sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Tastes of home

Did you ever notice that, although you might not think too much about what your normal, everyday family food tastes like, it always tastes the best when you've been away and then come back? You get used to your own spices and your own ways of chopping things (or your spouse's, or your mother's), how big you make your muffins, what your regular brand of peanut butter tastes like, whether or not you ice your brownies (or put nuts in them, or put chocolate chips on top)--and you don't notice those things really until you're eating somebody else's food. I remember visiting Quebec a couple of times (a long time ago), and every time I ate lasagna, it had chili pepper flakes in it. Unheard of around here! When Mr. Fixit and Mama Squirrel were on their honeymoon in the mythical days before squirrelings, they stayed at a resort where every night's dinner was something fried and battered: battered fish, chicken nuggets and so on. Finally Mr. Fixit admitted, "I just want to get home and eat some tofu."

For the Beehive folk, it's Texas tacos and cheeseburgers after their trip to Scotland.

For Mr. Fixit, who had to suffer through a fancy filet mignon dinner last night and another fancy lunch today (he REALLY doesn't like sushi), it was coming home to some Kitchener Special tonight.

What's your taste of home?

April Fools Day,by Ponytails.

Today is April Fools Day, and we've done a lot of pranks. To start off the day, Mama put big salad spoons for little spoons to eat cereal. And she put ketchup and relish and mustard on the table for a joke. And Mr. Fixit put a spider under the napkins and pulled it across the table. I knew it was there because I saw the white string. Then we went grocery shopping and I was putting some juice in the freezer and.........I saw a fake spider jumping out at me!!!!! It was then hanging on the Fridge! And when I opened the fridge....I was freaked out at the spider when you see it was hanging on the fridge and when I was opening the fridge the fake spider started crawling up the fridge!!!!!!!!!!! And when I anwsered the phone it was one of my friend's sisters, and for an April Fools Day trick they said that my friend had laryngitis and I couldn't call her for 1 or 2 months!!!!!!!!!
~~~~~Ponytails

The Phantom Tollbooth and other things, by Ponytails

First of all, I watched The Phantom Tollbooth movie. And then Mama read me the book. Why didn't they put Alec Bings, the Sound Valley, the whole orchestra, and other things like Canby (can-be) in the movie? I guess because they didn't want to make the movie too long. I think Rhyme and Reason looked prettier in the book, because in the movie they're just yellow and red outlines of people, sort of. Why do they do that to a lot of books: make them into a movie, different?

I took two really cool pictures, and some others. Here's one.

It's a picture of tulip leaves sprouting. I like taking pictures.

Dessert creation

The Apprentice wanted to make something for dessert tonight, but we didn't have a lot of ingredients to play around with besides a container of ricotta cheese. I showed her the recipe for Tortoni, and she wanted to know if we could make it chocolate-flavoured, and not frozen. Why not? So this is what we came up with. It's not all that original; variations are all over the Internet, some low-carb, some artificially sweetened; sometimes the same kind of chocolate-cheese mixture is used as a stuffing for pears or blintzes. Our version is rich but not very sweet.

Cocoa Ricotta Cream

1 500-gram (2 cup) container ricotta cheese (lite is fine)
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
About 1/4 cup of honey (we didn't measure)
1/4 cup brown sugar (or more to taste; you could also use just brown sugar, no honey)

Combine all the ingredients in a blender or food processor, and blend until very smooth. (We started out with just the cheese, cocoa and honey, but it needed more sweetener, so we added the sugar and blended it again.) Chill in small dessert dishes. Makes 4 (larger) to 6 (small) servings.

Crayons is really good with felts, by Ponytails

Today Crayons did something really cute. She was using a felt set from a garage sale, and she was doing some Silver Chair Narnia with it. That set is really good for it. You can make the snake and everything. And there's even a "Good Day Travellers" lady in a green kirtle. And this is how it looks.

Crayons: I'm making Narnia.

Ponytails: Can I see maybe?

Crayons: See? This is Rilian tied up, and see, this is Eustace taming the dragon, and this is Puddleglum. And see, this is Jill with a bag of the nightclothes of the giants, and the giants' little baby bed that Jill sleeped in, and the giants' cookbook.

And this is so cute...she made the witch, and she used blue ducks and blue birds to make the earth workers, and our green felt lady was down there with them.

We watched a Silver Chair Narnia movie, and it's kind of bad, because the snake is so unreal. It looks like a puppet on Mr. Dressup or something. I like Puddleglum, because he's Tom Baker, Dr. Who. (Jellybabies, Sarah?)

~~Ponytails

Dumping leftovers

Since Crayons has discovered she can read "a zillion stories," it's been a lot of fun going back over some of her old favourites and letting her do the reading. Yesterday we took turns with a Mother Goose book. She read,

"Pease porridge hot
Pease porridge cold
Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old."

Ponytails was listening and she said, "I know YOU put it in muffins, but then it's only TWO days old."

Mmmm....

Homeschooling Carnival at The Common Room

This week's Homeschooling Carnival is now up at The Common Room, and it includes our post about Crayons' approach to reading. The always-amazing DHM and family have managed to get this up in spite of the fact that they're moving into their brand-new house (complete with Common Room) this week. Hurray!

My birthday present, my preciousss

I am not a teapot collector. In fact, I've poured tea for the last sixteen years out of the same red Chinese teapot. So Mr. Fixit kindly bought me a new one that goes much nicer with the blues and browns in our kitchen. (It matches the blog pretty well, too, don't you think?)

Chinese food

One of the first (and really the only) sort-of-international restaurants I remember eating at WIWAK (When I Was a Kid--there, I just made up my own Internet abbreviation) was George's Chinese Restaurant. George was probably the most authentic Chinese thing about the place...it was pretty standard Cantonese-for-Canadian-tastes cuisine. Very good food, but not scary.

When I started university, I had a Chinese-Canadian roommate whose parents ran a restaurant. She told me that it was also a to-Canadian-tastes restaurant, and that when her parents wanted to eat real Chinese food, they closed the restaurant and headed to Toronto. Since we were studying in Toronto, she offered to take a couple of us to Chinatown for something a little more adventurous than soo guy almond.

So we were introduced to congee, and rice noodles fried with meat, and the little bowls filled with rice where you take some of what's on the table and add it to your bowl. And chopsticks, of course. And tilting the lid on your teapot to signal that you wanted more. I went back to that restaurant a few times while I lived in Toronto, and also checked out some other interesting places. One restaurant I remember featured the cooking of some Chinese province that specialized in spicy (not Szechuan). Not realizing just how hot that chili-spiked dish was already, I added some of the bowl of sauce on the table...it wasn't plum sauce! But I ate it anyway.

This recipe is a lot tamer than that. I think it's kind of semi-authentic Chinese (meaning it uses hoisin sauce instead of ketchup). We've made it a couple of times and it's very tasty.

Beef and Green Bean Stir Fry

1 sweet red or green pepper
1 lb. lean ground beef (we have also used leftover roast beef)
1 tbsp. vegetable oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp. minced gingerroot (the kind you have to chop up)
1/4 tsp. each salt and pepper
3 cups diagonally halved trimmed green beans
1/2 cup beef stock (I used no-MSG bouillon powder)
1/4 cup hoisin sauce
2 tbsp. soy sauce
1 tbsp. cornstarch
2 green onions, thinly sliced
Rice or noodles for serving

Get everything ready to go before you cook. Seed, core and cut the pepper into thin strips. Mix up the beef stock, hoisin sauce, soy sauce and cornstarch. Chop up the beans, garlic and ginger.

Ready? In wok or large skillet, stir-fry the beef over high heat until no longer pink, about 3 minutes. Using slotted spoon, remove the beef and set aside. (If you're using leftover meat, cut it into thin strips and add it later with the vegetables.)

Drain fat from the wok; add oil. Stir-fry garlic, ginger, salt and pepper over medium heat until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add green beans, red pepper and 2 tbsp. water; cover and steam until beans and pepper are tender-crisp, 3 minutes.

Return beef to wok. Stir up the hoisin mixture again and stir into pan. Bring to boil; boil, stirring, until sauce is thickened and glossy, about 1 minute. Sprinkle with green onions or pass them at the table.

(Source: Canadian Living Magazine, March 2005)

Dulcie's Dish

I've mentioned the Beany Malone Cookbook before and given the recipe for Beany's Beans. I thought I had posted this recipe for a helper-like dish before, but I don't see it in our archives. Like Beany's Beans and like our Kitchener Special, this recipe (which we had for supper last night) does not use gourmet ingredients. In fact, the number of recipes we make that include ingredients like ketchup is kind of embarrassing. Not particularly healthy or fashionable, I know. But this one is good, inexpensive, and husbands and young squirrels like it, so I'm passing it on, with a couple of adaptations.

Dulcie's Macaroni Meal in a Skillet

2 tbsp. bacon fat (we leave this out)
1 lb. ground beef or ground chicken (it's good with chicken; in a pinch we have even used bacon)
1 medium onion, diced
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper (or less, to taste--we don't like that much pepper)
1/2 tsp. paprika
1 8-oz. can tomato sauce (or equivalent anything else like tomato puree; last night I used part of a can of diced tomatoes and added a little extra water)
1 1/2 cups water, or as needed (depending on how wet the tomatoes are)
1 tsp. prepared mustard
1 rounded tsp. brown sugar
1 tbsp. cider vinegar
1/2 cup ketchup
2 cups elbow macaroni (we used whole wheat)
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese for serving (optional. We were out of Parmesan, so I grated some Cheddar and mixed that in before serving.)

This is how I do it. Because the list of spices and things is kind of long, I combine the salt, pepper and paprika with the cupful or canful of tomato sauce (just dump them in the top of the opened can). I put the mustard, sugar and vinegar into the half cup of ketchup. I chop the onion and start browning the ground meat in a large skillet that has a cover; when it's almost done I stir in the onion and finish browning it. When the onion's soft, I add the tomato sauce mixture. The recipe says to rinse the tomato sauce can out with the 1 1/2 cups of water and add that to the skillet. (If you don't have a tomato sauce can, obviously you just measure out the water and add that.) And then add the ketchup mixture.

Stir it all together, bring it to a boil, and then add the two cups of macaroni. Let it boil for a minute or two, and then cover (if you haven't already), turn the heat down, and cook for about 1/2 an hour or until the macaroni is done. You can check it occasionally and add more water if necessary. Mix in grated cheese if you want, or serve with Parmesan at the table.

You can also add canned grean beans or mushrooms to this skillet meal; we've done both. Mr. Fixit likes to add hot sauce at the table.

Preschool Theology

Crayons (drawing): I'm making a picture of God.

(Note from Mama Squirrel: I was not so sure about this, re violating one of the Ten Commandments and so on, but since I know that God and Jesus are interchangeable in Crayons' mind, I murmured something like "okay.")

Crayons: Does God have a wife?

Mama Squirrel: No.

Crayons: Oh...why not? Did she die then?

Mama Squirrel: No...God just doesn't need a wife, he's enough all by himself.

(Pause to draw some more)

Crayons: Does God have wings? I'm drawing wings.

Mama Squirrel: No, God's everywhere. He doesn't need wings.

Crayons: (as scornfully as a four-year-old can say this) Humph. Well, then, how is he supposed to FLY, then?

(Note to self: I think we need to sing some of those Judy Rogers catechism songs again.)

Kitchen Floor Cookies? Oh so frugal, but good

No, no. They're not made with floor sweepings. (My kids think they're so funny.)

These are supposed to be called Kitchen Scrap Cookies, which I don't really like either, but it will have to do for now. I found it on the Like Merchant Ships blog, via a side trip through In a Shoe. Since we did have leftovers from this morning's crockpot cereal (the main ingredients of that were brown rice and oat groats, with a little TVP), I decided to try it. They are good! A lot like pumpkin drop cookies without the pumpkin, which makes sense if you think about it because you're just substituting one thick wet thing for another thick wet thing. We got about four dozen small cookies out of the batch.

Another idea for using up that cooked crockpot cereal (or leftover oatmeal) is to put it in muffins--this only uses up a bit of it (maybe half a cup of cooked cereal per dozen muffins), but sometimes that's what you have. I follow the Tightwad Gazette's instructions for incorporating cooked grains into muffin batter: that is, run them with all the other wet ingredients through the blender, and then add the dry ingredients and adjust the wetness as needed then. I don't own a real blender, but a stick blender works fine for this. I like some applesauce and cinnamon added too. And muffin batter can also become muffin cake if you bake it in a square pan at 350 degrees.

Subversive tuna recipe

Subversive because, according to a certain person on American TV (see two posts below), I should be contributing more to society than a tuna recipe.

But I'm going to send it around anyway, because it's pretty easy and because it's not tuna casserole. The Squirrel family really does not like tuna casseroles. We've tried regular tuna casserole, Asian tuna casserole, a few other variations, and they all end up tasting like...tuna casserole.

So when we hit a really good sale on tuna a few weeks ago (I think it was 58 cents a can, so eat your heart out David Tsubouchi--does anyone remember his little tuna fiasco?), I wasn't sure what we were going to do with several cans of tuna besides make sandwiches.

Then I remembered Edna Staebler's recipe for Salmon or Tuna Wrap-Up in More Food That Really Schmecks. Edna recently turned 100 and celebrated with a big birthday party. This book came out when she was a young thing of about 75 and I was just learning to cook...Mom and Dad Squirrel gave me a copy for my birthday that year.

Oh yes...the recipe. Well, I'm not going to give you the whole thing because I think you can figure most of it out for yourself. This is what you do:

1. Make your favourite tuna salad with two cans of tuna (or salmon). Because we have some food aversions in the family to things like raw chopped onion, we make about the simplest possible tuna salad: tuna plus some generic white salad dressing (you know the stuff, it looks like mayonnaise) plus a spoonful of pickle relish. You can use any other kind of tuna salad you want, as healthy or as unhealthy as you prefer.

2. Make a biscuit dough with the following ingredients: 1/4 cup butter, margarine or oil; 2 cups flour (I used unbleached all-purpose); 3 tsp. baking powder; 1/2 to 3/4 tsp. salt; 3/4 cup milk or enough to make the dough hang together. This is just basic biscuit dough with an extra teaspoon of baking powder.

3. Roll the dough out into an oblong about 1/2 inch thick. Either spread the tuna salad over it and roll up like a jelly roll (what we did); or line a greased loaf pan with the dough, with the edges hanging out, plop the tuna salad on top, and bring the edges not quite together in the middle (leave a vent). If you roll it up like a jelly roll, put the whole thing into the greased loaf pan.

4. Bake at 400 degrees F for at least 15 minutes, maybe 20, until the biscuit dough is done. (I had it in at 425 degrees just to be sure.) If you rolled it up, you can remove it from the loaf pan, slice it into several rounds, and serve it on a platter. If you did the wrap-around version, you'll probably have to serve it from the pan.

5. Serve with a white sauce or gravy if you like, and a salad. (We have a vegetarian gravy recipe from the Goldbecks' book American Wholefoods Cuisine, that's simple to mix up. I'll post it if anybody wants it.)

6. Ta-da. Hot tuna sandwiches.

Crayons does it her own way

Since our last post three weeks ago about Crayons' reading progress, she's moved on from Arthur's Pen Pal to two Golly Sisters books, Little Bear, and a couple of other easy readers. Tonight she worked through Caps for Sale, even though she had to ask what a bunch of the words were. (If I'm sitting beside her, she just stops reading until I say the word she doesn't know--I can pretty much predict which ones are going to stump her anyway.) She reads the same books over and over, to herself, to her doll, or to anyone who will listen. [Side note for anyone who's just climbed up to the Treehouse: Crayons will be five this May.]

Part of what she's doing is memory of the story, especially on the hard words. Part of it is her good memory for sight words, and part of it is sounding things out. She already knows these stories so well that what she remembers can carry her over the things she can't sound out. Every few days I try to dig out something at her level that I remember her sisters reading at that stage, and help her read through it. Or if it's one of those four-stories-in-one books like Frog and Toad, I'll read a story and then she'll read a story. After that she just takes the book and reads it until we don't ever want to hear it again.

I read the curriculum catalogues and realize how much learn-to-read material we seem to be skipping over. It's not systematic, it's not sequential. We've been playing games for about a year to get her to this point [Side Note: We're only talking a few minutes of word games every couple of days, in case you think I pressured a four-year-old into learning to read], but it was her own sudden burst of confidence that moved her into this new "I can do it" stage. If I had a child who would just take things at the "normal" pace, I'd use the old Alphaphonics book and help her grow her reading vocabulary bit by bit. But Crayons (like her sisters) hasn't wanted lists of phonics words, or especially anything to do with "short vowels" or "consonants"...in a way, she's not even ready for them. What four-year-old is? What she wanted was to be able to read books, and now she's there. Buddy-reading time (when we're reading books written at about a grade 2 level) has changed from me reading most of the words and letting her fill in a line here and there, to her doing most of the words and me filling in the extras.

At this point it doesn't take a lot of teaching. It doesn't take follow-up activities (let's all pretend we have a pen pal like Arthur, and write a letter to him). It just takes a lot of listening.

Quote from Crayons: "I can read a zillion stories, and I know about numbers, so now I want to do math."

Well, she knew what she meant

From Crayons: "Some mothers and fathers don't have any children."

John Ruskin on books

"What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses? If a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad--a biblio-maniac. But you never call any one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear of people ruining themselves by their books. Or, to go lower still, how much do you think the contents of the book-shelves of the United Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, as compared with the contents of its wine-cellars?....how long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it!" "Bread of flour is good, but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book; and the family must be poor indeed which, once in their lives, cannot for such multipliable barley-loaves, pay their baker's bill." --John Ruskin, "Of Kings' Treasuries," in Sesame and Lilies

Ruskin on masked words

"There are masked words droning and skulking about us....which nobody understands, but which everybody uses, and most people will also fight for, live for, or even die for, fancying they mean this, or that, or the other, or things dear to them: for such words wear chameleon cloaks--"groundlion" cloaks, of the color of the ground of any man's fancy: on that ground they lie in wait, and rend him with a spring from it. There were never creatures of prey so mischievous, never diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners so deadly, as these masked words; they are the unjust stewards of all men's ideas; whatever fancy or favorite instinct a man most cherishes, he gives to his favorite masked word to take care of for him; the word at last comes to have an infinite power over him,--you cannot get at him but by its ministry."

--John Ruskin, "Of Kings' Treasuries," in Sesame and Lilies

An educated person

"....you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough), and remain an utterly "illiterate," uneducated person; but....if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter,--that is to say, with real accuracy,--you are for evermore in some measure an educated person."

--John Ruskin, "Of Kings' Treasuries" in Sesame and Lilies

All around the kitchen

Re-posted in 2011, with updates

Our friend the DHM at The Common Room started a Meme for Monday. In other words, a quiz game to play and pass on, in this case about our kitchens and cooking habits.

1. How many meals does most of your family eat at home each week? How many are in your family?

Two adults, one teenager, two younger children. We eat most meals at home, maybe eat out once a month. Mr. Fixit sometimes stays at work over lunch and goes out for a burger.

2. How many cookbooks do you own?

I thought I had quite a few, but definitely not as many as the DHM's guess of 300. Maybe 40? I have some doubles for the girls (for when they're out on their own someday).



3. How often do you refer to a cookbook each week?

Including my binder of printouts and clippings? Probably several times a week.

4. Do you collect recipes from other sources?

The Internet is one of my favourite sources as well, particularly recipes from friends' blogs. I also think the recipes from Canadian Living turn out pretty well. As Mama Lion said in her responses, the Internet has definitely changed my cookbook-buying habits and also my clipping-and-saving habits. Reading the Hillbilly Housewife's site alone has been the equivalent of a new cookbook.

5. How do you store recipes?

The ones I like go into a binder. Clippings I'm just thinking about go in an accordion file.

6. Do you follow recipes pretty closely, or use them primarily to give you ideas?

Depends on what it is. I've read so many recipes for things like lentil soup that by now I just notice "oh, they put in oregano and carrots, maybe I'll try that." But some recipes work so well just the way they're written that I don't want to change them. I like recipes that give you variations and suggestions for substitutions, because I don't always have whatever-it-is on hand.

7. Is there a particular ethnic style or flavor that predominates in your cooking?

How about this: Post-vegetarian/tightwad/comfort food with a few shots of Mennonite and Schwabian. (Mr. Fixit's family cooked in an Eastern European style that combined German, Hungarian and Croatian cooking influences.)

8. What's your favourite kitchen task related to meal planning and preparation?

Taking something out of the oven that smells good. And maybe puttering around before supper time, getting everything on the table.




9. What's your least favourite part?

Peeling things.

10. Do you plan menus before you shop?

I usually have several meals in mind but I don't always know when we're going to have them.

11. What are your favourite kitchen tools or appliances?

Crockpot, toaster oven, timer. And Mr. Fixit's power grinder that sharpens knives, but that's in the garage.

12. If you could buy one new thing for your kitchen, money no object and space not an issue, what would you most like to have?

A gas stove and new curtains.

13. Since money and space probably are objects, what are you most likely to buy next?

A blender, if I can find one at a yard sale. (I want to make milkshakes.)

14. Do you have a separate freezer for storage?

Yes, we just got one.

15. Grocery shop alone or with others?

We all go together on Saturdays, and then Mr. Fixit goes to the butcher's when he's at that end of town.

16. How many meatless main dish meals do you fix in a week?

It depends on the week. Usually a couple of nights a week, and then I guess you could count "meatless leftovers" the next day!



17. If you have a decorating theme in your kitchen, what is it? Favourite kitchen colours? (And yes, I spell Canadian; doing it the other way is like walking backwards for me.)

A theme? "Homeschool Contemporary." Blue and yellow flowered wallpaper. I have a few vintage china things out that I like, roosters and funny-face jam jars.

18. What's the first thing you ever learned to cook, and how old were you?

My mother let me put bacon on the Kraft Pizza Mix when I was about three...

19. How did you learn to cook?

Brownie Cooking Badge when I was nine?

"1. Prepare a breakfast, set the table and serve the breakfast. It should include: juice, cooked cereal, boiled or poached egg, toast and milk. Tea or coffee for adults.

2. Prepare and pack the following in a lunch box:
a) A sandwich made with meat, poultry, fish, cheese, egg or peanut butter filling. [I guess tofu spread wasn't an option?]
b) A raw vegetable, washed and prepared, such as carrots, turnip or celery sticks.
c) A raw fruit or cooked or canned fruit in a leak-proof container.
d) Simple cookies you have made.
e) A hot drink in an insulated container.
OR
Prepare and serve, at a table or on a tray, a lunch or supper to include:
a) Hot soup, either homemade or canned.
b) A sandwich made with meat, fish, poultry, cheese, egg or vegetable filling; with a raw vegetable served on the side.
c) Canned fruit.
d) Milk, tea or coffee for adults."

I also learned from making a lot of dinners during high school (my mom often got home from work right at supper time) and from working for a chef in a camp kitchen one summer. I did NOT learn from the one year of grade 7 home ec I took.

[Oh, I forgot to say that I took a Community Nutrition Worker course ten years ago. But that wasn't about learning to cook--it was more about budgeting and shopping, and getting people to try things like lentils.]

20. Who else would you like to participate?

Has to be somebody else with a blog, right? OK, I tag Marsha at the Abarbablog.

Our Blog's First Birthday

This is the first birthday of Dewey's Treehouse! Climb on up and celebrate with us.

Barbie goes to the mall

One day, Barbie went to the mall.


She saw a new store and decided to try on some clothes.


"I think I'm starting to see a pattern here!"


"Aaahh! Even the shoes are too skimpy!"


"Can I help you with something?"
"You can help me get pneumonia! I'm shopping somewhere else."


Barbie was walking to the pizza restaurant when she saw another new store.


So she went in.


She liked the clothes...


...and the hairstyles.


So she tried on an outfit.


She liked it so much that she bought it and another.


"Thanks so much for telling us about this awesome store, Barbie."
"Check out my cool threads, man."
"Yeah! This is, like, so totally retro!"


The End.

Treehouse milestones

1. Crayons read her first really real book out loud today: Arthur's Pen Pal, by Lillian Hoban. This isn't the aardvark Arthur from Marc Brown's TV series; this Arthur is a chimp. (Link on GoodReads)

2. The Apprentice made chocolate chip cookies all by herself. OK, she's baked other things, but this was her own idea and she did all the work. Except for cracking the eggs. The Apprentice will do anything to avoid getting gook on her fingers.

3. Ponytails can sing all the words to Kiki Dee's part of "Don't Go Breaking My Heart." She's also got most of the Kings and Queens of England song down pat, even though Beethoven's Wig had to go back to the library.

4. French Fry had a little tour around the house in his plastic ball. (We're pretty sure that French Fry is a boy.)

Some days are just full of new things.

Don't strategize me

The most overused, most meaningless word I've heard lately is "strategy." Usually used in the plural.

Example: a radio commercial against drinking and driving offers some suggestions (take a taxi) and then asks, "Which of these strategies do you use?" (How about just not getting drunk in the first place?)

Educationalists love "strategies", usually reading strategies. What strategies will Junior use to figure out the next word? Will he guess? Will he use the picture as a clue? This pretty much ignores the real problem, which is that Junior doesn't know because nobody's taught him.

The Apprentice got it right on. When I mentioned my issue with "strategies" to her, she said, "Isn't that a Dilbert kind of word?" Exactly. Nothing accomplished but it sure sounds good.

How to Shovel Snow, by Ponytails

How to shovel snow.
First you will need a shovel. Than you need to have a place with some snow. Than when you have got to your snowie place you take your shovel and dig gently. When you have got some snow on your shovel you dump it some where else. Than keep doing that till your done. And that is how you shovel snow.

~~Ponytails.

[Mama Squirrel's comment: Yep, that about sums it up.]

More of the Hamster and the Hamster, by Ponytails.

Okay, coffeemamma and others who have been waiting to find out who won the race in, "The Hamster and the Hamster", here it is:

[Part One is here]

And now they're at the same speed! Now it looks a lot like Josanne is going to win! Do you see Josanne just one Meter ahead! It is Josanne no! Rosanne. It looks like Josanne a lot. And there is the finish just one Meter ahead! Well for Josanne it is. And JOSANNE wins! The Rabbits cheer and they can’t stop! After they went home and had some nice warm bath.(But there is going to be more).

~Ponytails

The Hamster and the Hamster, by Ponytails

Hi, this is Ponytails. I am creating a story called The Hamster and The Hamster. Would you like to hear what I've done so far?

Dear Young Readers,

I will be happy to tell you the story of....................the Hamster and the Hamster.

Once upon a time there lived a Hamster named Rosanne and a Hamster named Josanne.
And they lived in a Castle the end. Just kidding! Ok now on with the story. And Rosanne And Josanne were cousins. One sunny day the Hamsters said they would like to Race. So they got some Rabbits to ready set go! And the Hamsters ran and ran! As fast as their little legs could take them! And then Josanne got in front and now Rosanne in the lead. And what is this? Why it is Josanne two Meters in front and now Rosanne in the lead it looks like Josanne maybe could it be Rosanne? The whistle blows time for a little BREAK! Ok now it is the end of the little BREAK.
Now it looks like Rosanne in the lead no! it’s Josanne now! No Rosanne I can’t keep track! Ok now what’s this? It’s Rosanne bumping in front! Now Josanne bumping in front could it be true?

What’s this? A wheel now Josanne in the wheel she can’t stop! Good she is off. Now Rosanne so fast on the wheel no could it be? the Rabbits are cheering for JOSANNE! Rosanne don’t bump. There’s the finish line ten Meters. Now Rosanne is making it nine Meters cause she went by one Meter. And on went Josanne and Rosanne five Meters till they finish. Five for Josanne and six Meters for Rosanne.(Remember their Hamsters).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Do you like it so far?

~~Ponytails

The funniest Groundhog Day joke I know

Pardon me if you've heard this too many times.

The teacher told her class that today was Groundhog Day.

There was silence and then a boy in the back of the class piped up, "Boy, am I glad I brought my own lunch!"

Introducing...French Fry

Some things we did today

Not necessarily in order.

1. Made a batch of Raisin Sesame Cookies (Mama Squirrel mixed and the Squirrelings plopped them on the pans).

1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
3/4 cup raisins or dried cranberries (optional)
1/2 cup oil
1 cup sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 1/4 cups rolled oats
1 cup sesame seeds
1/4 cup milk or enough to get the dough to hold together

Sift flour, soda, salt and cinnamon. Stir in raisins.

Beat together oil, sugar and egg. Add rolled oats, sesame seeds and milk. Combine with flour mixture until well blended.

Drop dough by heaping teaspoonfuls onto greased cookie sheets, allowing room for cookies to spread. Bake at 375 degrees F for 10 to 15 minutes (watch them at the end). Makes about 4 dozen medium-sized cookies.

(Source: The Harrowsmith Cookbook Volume One, contributed by Holly McNally of Fredericton, New Brunswick.)

2. Read about Henry Purcell and listened to the first track, "Welcome, welcome, glorious morn" on The Essential Purcell CD. You can hear a short sample of each track if you click on the link and scroll down. This piece was a birthday present for Queen Mary II (the one who reigned with her husband William). Purcell wrote her a birthday song every year that she reigned, which is only about seven birthdays (she died of smallpox when she was 32). We imagined we were at the Queen's birthday party listening to the music. At least with Purcell's songs you don't have to translate the words!

3. Read Chapter 5 of Children of the New Forest, about hunting deer and figuring out how to catch a wild cow. (Mama Squirrel read, The Apprentice and Ponytails listened, and Crayons played with her Dora Dominoes.)

4. Ponytails did a page in her new Purple Miquon Math workbook. She's up to the last book now! (You can download a few sample pages from the Purple book here.) We also played Arithmetic Four on the computer. (That's Connect Four but with math facts.)

5. Ponytails put some of our Magnetic Poetry words in alphabetical order.

6. The Apprentice read some of Homeschooling The Teen Years.

7. We watched the yard fill up with snow (apologies to Robert Frost). [Postscript: The snow fell but didn't amount to anything. We have a big brown-green muddy yard that doesn't know what's happening to it lately with all these thaws.]

What's for supper? Kitchener Special

By request, here is the recipe for a sausage-noodle dish which appeared in Whole Foods for the Whole Family (a La Leche League cookbook) and which was contributed by Linda Mellway. (Note on Whole Foods for The Whole Family: the copyright date is 1981...does that seem like 25 years ago? Sigh.) If you wonder about the name of the dish, Kitchener (Ontario) is a city in an area settled largely by Germans...Oktoberfest territory.
The recipe calls for "pork sausage", which can mean a lot of things. We make it with smoked sausage, which you can buy at a butcher's and which doesn't give off much grease...it's not the same as kielbasa, although that would probably work too. If you can't get smoked sausage, you could try it with whatever good sausage you have...not those greasy little breakfast things, though.

Kitchener Special

1 lb. pork sausage (we used two smoked sausages)
1/2 cup (1 small) chopped onion
1/2 cup sliced celery (I was more generous with this)
1/2 tsp. salt
dash pepper
1 tsp. chili powder
1/2 tsp. dry mustard
1/4 to 1/2 tsp. celery seeds (optional but good)
2 to 3 handfuls raw noodles (we like the extra broad frilly kind in this; finer ones would change the dish somewhat but would still be all right; and you could use macaroni or linguini, or maybe broken lasagna noodles, if you didn't have egg noodles)
4 cups tomatoes, quartered (in the winter you can use canned diced tomatoes, and the amount depends on how much you like tomatoes)
1/2 cup of water, or more depending on the tomatoes--enough to cook the noodles
1 cup grated Cheddar cheese, plus a bit extra for serving if you like

Cut sausage into 1-inch lengths. Brown in a large pot or skillet (large enough to hold the vegetables and the noodles as they expand). Add onion, celery and seasonings...cook a few minutes. Mix well and add remaining ingredients. (You can start grating the cheese now and add it partway through if you want.) Simmer for half an hour, OR turn it all into a casserole and bake for half an hour at 350 degrees, or until the noodles are done but not mushy. (I like to do it on top of the stove so that I can check it and stir it a few times. You have to keep an eye on the noodles and add a bit more liquid if needed.) Pass hot sauce for anyone who likes a bit more zip.

Remembering Scratcher, June 2004--January 2006

Overheard

1. A nameless Squirreling singing this: "Lift me up and let me stand on heav'n's potato land..."

(If you don't recognize the reference, Cyberhymnal can help out.)

2. Squirrelings squabbling about which track to listen to next on the Beethoven's Wig CD. (Check out the link, you can listen to samples on Amazon.) One of them wants the Surprise Symphony again because she likes the big BANG. The other wants the Can-Can song. Again. (Mommy, is our friend who went to France dancing the can-can now?) And they're all singing the Kings and Queens of England song, even Crayons, who enjoys correcting the last line. (It's two Georges, not three!)

3. Ponytails: "Apprentice, what is a cannibal?"
Crayons: "A cannibal, you know a cannibal. Like Tchaikovsky's Cannibal."

(Look at Track 11 of Beethoven's Wig for the explanation of this.)

Train your virtual camera on the Treehouse

Our friend Marsha at the Abarbablog (see the links to left) posted one of these so I'm doing a Squirrel family version.

Time: 3 p.m.

View from the window:
Snow.
Snow on the swingset, on the fences, all over the back yard.

Listen In
CBC radio playing in the kitchen
It's too quiet upstairs. I'd better make sure nobody's cutting their hair off. [Postscript: I found The Apprentice reading The Bells on Finland Street to Ponytails. Crayons was also not doing anything particularly scary.]

Supper Plans
Spaghetti and meat sauce; reheated garlic breadsticks (from the Hillbilly Housewife site--those have become a favourite around here); lettuce and mushroom salad; brownies. [Postscript after dinner: Oops, forgot about the breadsticks. I knew there was something else I was going to do.]

Other sounds
The ding of the garlic-shaped timer to say that the brownies are supposed to be done. But they're not. (I love my timer. I found it at a yard sale after the buzzer on our stove quit working, and it still makes me smile.)

In the Living Room

Agh! It's tidy!
(Some CM mammas are coming over tonight to talk shop.) [Postscript for non-homeschoolers: CM means Charlotte Mason, a British educator and author who lived about a hundred years ago and whose philosophy is the mainstay of our Treehouse homeschooling.]

Beauty in the Common Things

DHM's recipe for crockpot cereal (we used shortgrain brown rice and pearl barley).

Bach on the CBC.

A set of magnetic words (Magnetic Poetry), that we bought so long ago that the only extra word we added was The Apprentice's name. (I guess we should add a couple more now.) [Postscript: Magnetic Poetry is fun and their site has some good stuff; if you click on Kids you can even play online with some of their word sets, but they also sell some things that most readers of this blog will not appreciate. Forewarned is forearmed.]

Crayons asking for more Little Tim books, please.

We finished The Dawn Treader, by Ponytails

We finished The Voyage of the Dawn Treader last week. It's a good book. We're probably going to start The Silver Chair. We are also reading The Saturdays series (what I like to call them). Mommy and I have read The Saturdays, The Four-Story Mistake, Then There Were Five, and we're reading Spiderweb for Two. They're good books. They're about four kids named Mona, Rush, Miranda (they call her Randy) and Oliver. And their housekeeper, Evangeline Cuthbert-Stanley. They call her Cuffy and Cuff.

We had Turkish Delight tonight. We got it at the meat store. It smelled like hand soap and it kind of tasted like hand soap. It looks like big jube-jubes with sugar on them. Crayons said she wasn't going to eat hers, so The Apprentice and I broke hers in half and ate it together. I kind of wanted some more! (Okay, I'm not Edmund.)

Has anybody seen the Chronicles of Narnia movie? I'd like to see that movie. I'd like to see Lucy and Susan. I got my friend some Narnia things for her birthday: two puzzles, one of Lucy and Mr. Tumnus, and another of them waiting when they were going to go live with the Professor. And an activity book with magnets on top. I like the one of Lucy, she looks really nice.

~Ponytails:-)

Outgrowing

I'm packing a box of books to take to a homeschool support group meeting this weekend. I've done that lots of times before--given away extras from library sales, children's books we were done with or just didn't need. But this box is different. This week I took a look at my small shelf of how-to-homeschool books and realized that I was done with some of them.

Not ones I didn't like--these were ones that I did like. Did read. Did use. (Well, not the ones that I used so hard that nobody else would want to read past my scribbles and notes.) And when I looked at them, I realized that I'm done with them.

I have to be careful with that, because I don't mean that there's nothing else I could ever learn from those particular people. I'd love to hear some of them speak at a conference or maybe read something else by them. But somewhere along the way, I absorbed or processed what they were saying in these books; learned from it, and then branched out from it. I don't mean, either, that I'm now such an expert homeschooler that I have no more to learn. Maybe there will be some new how-to or why-to books that come along. But these particular books deserve a second or third life helping somebody else get going.

There is the book I bought at a conference when I was very pregnant with my second child, which was also the only conference I've ever been to with Mr. Fixit; we drove all the way to Mississauga (near Toronto) to hear Diana Waring speak, and buy grade one books for The Apprentice. I saw a particular book on creating curriculum and wanted it SO badly...and we bought it. And I used it. Actually that one I'm keeping...one of those notes-in-the-margins casualties.

There's also the fat everything-you-need-to-know book that I bought, new baby in tow, later that same year when I found (with amazement) that a local bookstore carried a few homeschooling titles. It's been updated since then and now comes with a CD-Rom; but maybe somebody else can still use it. It's scribble-free.

And there's a John Holt book, and How Do You Know They Know What They Know (I guess now I know), and Homeschooling for Dummies. (I got that one as part of a boxful at a rummage sale.) I already gave away my 1995 Cathy Duffy curriculum guide.

Going through them is a lot like packing away outgrown baby clothes, or giving away a tricycle because the baby is now riding a two-wheeler. Like the baby clothes, I never really thought I'd get to the point of not needing them. But the kids are getting older...and we've been homeschooling for almost a decade now. There is a point where you can stop looking at your student driver's manual, right?

Still it does bring on just a little sigh of something passing.

The Silver Chair in the Classroom

"It's all a lie," the beautiful lady said as she strummed her mandolin for Rilian, the children and Puddleglum. "There never were any important books." "There never were any important books," repeated the children, breathing in the magic perfume from the fire. "Your teachers told you lies," she murmured. "Your teachers told you lies." "A book may be important to me, but there's no reason it's important to you. Go and read your graphic novels," she hummed. At that moment Puddleglum stuck his webbed foot into the fire and all the others woke up suddenly. "Shakespeare! Dickens! Dead white guys!" they screamed in defiance, as the lady turned into an evil snake and hissed at them. The battle was an ugly one."
--with apologies to C.S. Lewis (The Silver Chair)

If you don't think this sort of battle goes on in our schools (I'm including Canadian schools in that "our"), please read this post at Tim Fredrick's ELA Teaching Blog. I found this through the 4th Literature Carnival.

To me it only emphasizes the huge gap between the education I want to provide for my children, and that "offered" (and only offered--and gingerly--one wouldn't want to impose one's standards) to the students in today's high school classes.

Do you eat kasha?

The host of this week's Carnival of the Recipes, the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room, recently posted about how far she feels their family has fallen in attempts to "eat healthy." Her mention of things like raw goat's milk and babies eating sweet potatoes made me laugh, because when The Apprentice was small we were doing much the same thing. The Apprentice didn't have candy or even more than the occasional Arrowroot cookie until she was old enough to know the difference, and her food-grinder baby dinners were often mashed with tofu or sprinkled with kelp. (That is actually a good iodine supplement. I wasn't a complete idiot.) And we did eat kasha...frequently enough that I do remember toddler Apprentice at least knowing what it was called when she met it in her bowl. (Kasha, at least in the way I mean it, is just a name for toasted buckwheat groats, cooked soft like rice.)

And like the DHM, our eating habits have changed enough that, when I bought a bag of kasha yesterday and decided to resurrect an old favourite recipe for it, not only did nobody remember what it was or even eating it, but we had an awfully big bowlful of it left. I will optimistically put that down to a tummy bug that's been stalling everyone's appetites here, and to the fact that kasha, like any long-forgotten friend, takes some getting used to again. It doesn't taste like rice. It doesn't taste like oats. It just tastes like itself...sort of toasted-nutty, a little bit stronger-flavoured than other grains (and it's not technically a grain, it's a relative of rhubarb). You can do all sorts of things with it and there are lots of traditional recipes for using it (like blintzes and kasha varnishkes), and non-traditional ones as well (there are some ideas here). You can also just cook it till it's soft, like rice or oatmeal.

So I'm not sorry I attempted to at least re-introduce kasha; although the encounter may not have been the most delightful, it was nice (at least for me) to renew an old acquaintance, and maybe I can find something appetizing to do with the leftovers.

Here's the recipe I made; it made a lot (for us). You could try cutting it in half. It came from the January 1992 Vegetarian Times; I'm sorry that I don't know who wrote the article.

Kasha-Vegetable Pilaf

1 1/2 tbsp. vegetable oil
1/2 medium onion, finely chopped (we skipped this; see below, it's a garnish)
1 1/2 cups dry kasha
1 egg, lightly beaten
2 1/2 cups boiling water
1 medium sweet potato, peeled and cubed
1/2 cup frozen corn
1/2 cup frozen peas (I skipped these and used one can of corn niblets instead)

If you're doing the onion garnish: in a small skillet, heat oil and saute onion until it turns medium brown, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside.

Place kasha in an ungreased skilled over medium-low heat, and toast for 3 to 5 minutes, stirring often, until the kasha becomes slightly darker. Add the beaten egg and stir quickly to coat the grains. Immediately add boiling water but do not stir. Add vegetables on top. Lower the heat and simmer, covered, until water is absorbed, kasha is puffy, and sweet potato is tender, about 20 to 25 minutes. Sprinkle sauteed onions on top, if you want them. (It's suggested that you can also add the raw onions to the kasha along with the other vegetables instead of sauteeing them.)

Blog game: fours of things

I was tagged for this by Tim's Mom--here goes.

Four jobs you've had in your life:

1. transcriptionist for a closed-captioning service
2. assistant to director of high school liaison services at a university (can you say that three times fast?)
3. nursing-home kitchen worker
4. camp crafts director

Four movies you would watch over and over:

1. Anything with some real acting but not too many machine guns.
2. Anything with gowns by Edith Head. (That covers a lot!)
3. Anything without Jim Carrey in it.
4. An Ache in Every Stake

Four places you have lived:

1. Southern Ontario
2. Toronto
3. Southern Ontario

Four TV shows you love to watch :
We don't have cable right now but if we got these shows I would watch them:
1. The Rockford Files
2. Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett
3. Clean Sweep
4. The Munsters, Phil Silvers, Hogan's Heroes...
5. Playing Shakespeare

Four places you have been on vacation:

1. Georgian Bay
2. Port Severn
3. Quebec City
4. Eustis, Florida

Four websites you visit daily:

1. Stump the Bookseller
2. www.homeschoolbuzz.com
3, 4, 5, 6...several of the blogs on our links

Four of your favorite foods:

1. Pasta with olives and sundried tomatoes (I'm the only one here that will eat it)
2. Chinese food (maybe some hong sue tofu and a bowl of noodles)
3. Cinnamon rolls
4. Peanut butter

Four places you would rather be right now:

1. Narnia
2. At a Vermeer exhibit
3. Watching a summer sunset on Georgian Bay (do a Google image search for "Georgian Bay sunset" and you'll see why)

Four bloggers you are tagging:

I don't know who's been tagged...but I'll tag Coffeemamma, Tootle, Firefly and Jennifer if they want to play.

Why we homeschool

We homeschool for a wide variety of reasons...academic, religious, lifestyle...and have been doing it since 1996. So, for us, the question becomes-- what reason would we have for needing or wanting our children to attend school? (For any of you who aren't regular visitors here, we have three daughters who have always been homeschooled. This is mostly about our oldest, who's known as The Apprentice.)

I can pinpoint one of the lines I read, early on, that propelled us towards homeschooling. I had borrowed Nancy Wallace's account of her own family's unschooling journey, Better Than School, from the library, and I came to the part where she described their son's classroom experiences in first grade. It wasn't a good year; her son was exhausted and unhappy, and when asked what the problem was, he complained that he no longer had enough time to read! (The link is to a 1984 Mother Earth News story about homeschooling; if you scroll down far enough, you'll see some excerpts from the book.)

I related to that. I remembered being yanked down by my jumper straps when I tried to climb up to an above-my-grade-level library shelf in the first grade. (Did anyone else go to a school where the books were actually arranged by grades?) I remembered having to use second-grade readers two years in a row (it involved a move from a school that encouraged "enrichment" to another one that didn't). I remembered doing many, many spelling lessons that taught me absolutely nothing (I was already a good speller. I was lousy at handwriting, but spelling lessons didn't improve that). I remembered getting to staple the teacher's papers as a reward for getting my work done early. (What a motivation.)

I also remembered the darker side of school--the pressures, the bullies, the unhappiness when you can't seem to find a place to fit in. I was a geek from the get-go. Many of us have been there and it's not a memory we'd want to spend much time musing on.

And right at that time (when we were thinking about homeschooling), our flavour-of-the-month provincial ministry of education announced a brilliant idea. They would provide optional junior kindergarten not only for the four-year-olds (that was already in place) but also for the three-year-olds. Moms who wanted free babysitting cheered. Everyone else seemed doubtful, including Mr. Fixit's cousin who was teaching JK and had had to buy a supply of changes-of-underwear for her classroom already. And we had a child turning three. Oh but wait--a change of government came in right then and axed not only that idea, but also four-year-old JK. For a little while. Then JK came back (but not for the three-year-olds).

Oh, and then there was the common curriculum that our province brought in (like the "standards" some other countries talk about). And there was a teachers' strike. And there was provincial testing for grade 3 and 6 classes. And the whole idea of self-esteem (that is, spending time on how special we are instead of on math) and values clarification (whatever its present-day name is) and groupthink and not hurting a child's feelings by saying that his work is careless or his spelling is wrong.

In short, we had no intention of allowing The Apprentice to become a guinea pig for some government's idea of what her education should be. Or shouldn't be. Or might be for six months until the latest greatest idea came up. (The newest thing in our school system is that children don't have a lunch hour anymore. They have two "nutrition breaks" during the day instead. This was sold to the parents as something that would encourage better nutrition and more time to play outdoors, but it was actually prompted by demands for longer breaks for the teachers.)

And I wanted her to have time in her life to read.

The Apprentice has never become what you'd call a bookworm. She prefers to make things (like bead jewelery or knitted Barbie skirts), or help Mr. Fixit build CB radios and install computers. But when she does read...she knows what's worth reading, what's middlin', and what's garbage. Would she be better off in a classroom, now that she's getting close to the usual high school age? Maybe...if we can get enough of the important stuff covered first. Does she want to go? She's not sure herself. It would be sort of fun...but right now, she says she likes being at home.

[Update, May 2007: This was first posted in January 2006, when we were tossing around the possibilities for The Apprentice's future education. In September 2006, she enrolled part time at the local high school, and she has spent two interesting semesters there taking all the hands-on things that she enjoys--plus science and French--and I get to brag that she's on the honour roll too. She's planning on continuing there, still part time, next school year. Beyond that, she's looking at apprenticeship possibilities in a couple of the trades that interest her.]

Sugar-free treats

Sugar-free recipes don't always interest Mama Squirrel too much; that is, the ones that require either some kind of artificial sweetener or things like a whole can of fruit juice concentrate. The results (in her opinion) don't usually live up to the effort required, and that much fruit juice is still a sugar, yes?

But here's a recipe for Banana-Prune Bread that we have tried and found pretty good. It came out of a sugar-free cookbook years ago, and I don't know which one. If you do, please let me know so I can give proper credit. This is posted especially for our friends at the Common Room who are giving sugar a rest this month.

Banana-Prune Bread

Makes 1 loaf or 12 slices.

2 medium ripe bananas
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1/3 cup unsweetened prune juice with pulp [my note: I only know one kind of prune juice, the regular old supermarket kind, and that seems to work fine]
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup chopped pitted prunes
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamom
1/4 tsp. salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F; spray a 9 by 5 inch loaf pan with cooking spray, set aside.

In large bowl mash bananas; stir in wet ingredients. Mix dry ingredients separately, mix with banana mixture until just blended.

Spoon into prepared pan; bake 50-60 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. Cool on rack 10 minutes; remove from pan and cool completely.


Mary Carroll's recipe for Dried Fruit Bars, posted back in November, is also more-or-less sugar free, depending on what kind of granola you use for the base. A simpler dried-fruit recipe is the one that some people call "sugar plums"; you run approximately equal amounts of three or four kinds of dried fruit through the food processor (some people add nuts to this), roll into small balls, and roll the balls in some kind of coating--coconut, ground oatmeal, etc. Our favourite combination is dates, figs, apricots and raisins, but other fruits will work fine.

A Reason for Reading

"Books are wonderful ways to learn the possibilities of being human. We can define character traits with words, but they take shape only when you see what they look like in a person. How can we understand honor or valor or courage unless we have sometimes seen these traits in someone's life? Good literature may so move the reader that is seems impossible to verbalize about it. The experience is what counts....

"This is why an evil character in a story may reveal the real nature of evil more clearly than a sermon on sin. Reading stories is also a vicarious way to see how goodness and humility and honesty and beauty play out in life. Literature does instruct us, even thought it may not be our main reason for reading. Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in Jesus Rediscovered that books like Resurrection or The Brothers Karamazov gave him an overpowering sense of how uniquely marvelous a Christian way of looking at life is, and a passionate desire to share it. Good books have a way of instructing the heart."

--Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Woman's Heart

NEW YEARS TIME, by Ponytails

For New Years we had a Narnia party. And I made an Aslan mask and tail out of brown and yellow paper. For dinner Mommy made baked apples with raisins in the top, and sausages (with real meat) and potatoes. For dessert she made peach-banana sherbet, and we made cookies--warriors, and lions (Aslan). And Daddy provided some shows for us to do. I was Aslan in one of them. I was the White Witch in one of them, and The Apprentice was Mrs. Beaver. Mrs. Beaver was a locksmith, and the White Witch couldn't get into her house. She tried everything, then she called up Mrs. Beaver. I turned Mrs. Beaver to stone--that wasn't in the story. I turned her back again and she gnawed the door open. I said, "Is there anything I can do to pay you back?" Mrs. Beaver said, "Turn some of my friends back from being stone." I turned Daddy and Crayons and Mommy back. When I turned Mommy back, she started saying, "Pick up your clothes, young witch!" And then I turned her BACK into stone.

The Apprentice was in charge of Beadie Buddies. I made a mouse. So did Daddy. And we went on a treasure hunt for pink cordial, a fur coat and a flute.

And we did a devotion. That was Bible time, and talking about things we did this year, and what stood out in our life in 2005. I remembered going to Kelsey's restaurant with our grandma and grandpa. It's a long way away, about three hours.
HAPPY NEW YEAR.HAPPY NEW YEAR.HAPPY NEW YEAR.HAPPY NEW YEAR. HAPPY NEW YEAR. HAPPY NEW YEAR.-Ponytails From Dewey's tree house